Hardware Synology DiskStation DS211+ Review

With a large fan, 512MB of DDR3 memory and a 1.6GHz CPU, is the DS211+ a speed daemon?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2011/08/13/synology-diskstation-ds211-review/1

 

wow, that's simply amazing speed.

and here is a public demo of their amazing NAS interface.
http://www.synology.com/us/products/demo/index.php

same as any electronic product, i always believe an easy to use one is miles better than a harder to use product that requires a lot of your time.

 

@wuyanxu: Other side of the coin is the situation like what happened to my coworker - he bought himself a QNAP NAS for 4 drives, because he could install ipkg packages. He was happy, until he found out that there is no PHP 5.3 package in ipkg, compiling it for yourself is hard as hell,...

NAS is good, if all you need is already supported by the firmware. But if you want more, you are maybe looking at wrong device for the job.

 

I can't be the only person not impressed with the speed of these devices, they must be CPU limited as the drives and network are capable of much more.

A low end 2 core Sandy bridge CPU running at minimum speed running with an array of 4 Disks in Raid 5 will max out a gigabit connection, transferring files at 115-130 MB/s in both directions. Small file transfers around 60MB/s.

These NAS products aren't even that much cheaper than getting an MITX board with 2GB of RAM and a low end CPU with an appropriate case. They are simple to setup and use but so is FreeNas.

 

They should only sell NAS boxes with a minium of 4 drive bays and raid 5 support, otherwise why bother?

 

HP Proliant Microserver is only £120 so why would I buy this? Freenas is free... So I just can't see how you justify this product in this type of magazine...

 

Man, what are you drinking ? 115-130MB/s ? On a gigabit ethernet ? Through Samba ? You can call yourself lucky if you get 70-80MB/s with jumbo frames. Small files at 60MB/s through gigabit ethernet ?

 

I have the DS211j and its never let me down!
With 2 1TB drives setup to mirror I dont have to worry about my data getting lost or deleted ever again.

 

yeah thing with nas.. you just build a linux box- can do anything and it's secure remote with a ras key + password

put as many drives as you want, ssh in, do whatever you need.. I never did get nas really- it's easy but limited

 

For many the "limited" is good enough, and if you add a easy web based UI on top of it, they are sold .

/me looks at my i5-2500K+8GB+10 hard drive "NAS"

 

it's like iphone vs android.

i prefer iphone. limited, everything works with minimal tweaking.

there's always people out there like me, want something that works out of the box. and this Synology model is certainly one of the best.

 

I don't know what is with all the people with their uber own built NAS devices, you are enthusiasts, you know what you are doing, aside from the usual overkill hardware just for a NAS device, If you know what you want how to get it, then I doubt you will even peak at consumer devices like these, this product is clearly for people who just wan't a small basic out of the box NAS device. why not 4-5 drives? they don't need it, why 2? the most common thing they will ever need, redundancy. that will take little to no thinkering just to get it working, keep in mind most of who will be using this might not even be saturating their gigabit connection all the time. or they might be even using wireless connections at most.

 

@dyzophoria: this specific device maybe. But don't degrade NAS just to some home user category. I'm not sure you could put this device in that category for example :
http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS3611xs&lang=enu

And it is still a NAS.

For example my "NAS" is also a development webserver, database i run virtualization on it, XBMC, DVB-C TV capture, SqueezeBox, it is also a download station...

 

If you are going to spend this much on a storage solution then you'd be better off chucking a load of hard drives in an old PC and using unRAID. It uses one drive for redundency so it can rebuild any of the other drives if they die and you can add up to 20 data drives and they all look and act as one LARGE network drive on my main PC!

You can get a new case with 9 external drive bays for around £43 and then use 3 of these bay converters to house 12 drives all for total £82.50.

It also uses an easy web based UI like these NAS boxes but also can use multiple addons made by the community to add extra features.

Loving my unRAID server.

 

Great product but it's twice the price of the DS211J... If you are a consumer and you want something that just works then the DS211J is great. But this one is getting too close to the price of a full blown pc, and it doesn't even include the disks. The performance is certainly improved but do the "consumer" cares? AFAIK the underlyong OS and the features are identical

 

I think some of you are missing the point of a NAS. They are a specialised ready-to-go product with very little setup needed and offers web server, iTunes, DLNA, etc. Yes I could have built a PC for cheaper, but it would have pulled at least 50W (My NAS pulls only 18 - 20W with drives), had all the usual bugs\setup problems that Windows or Linux would have had and would not be able to be put away on a shelf and be largely forgotten about.

I do not have the time to learn/configure Linux code (yes I do know the NAS is based on Linux) and find windows too unreliable. I have tried the latest Windows Home Server and no matter what Microsoft say, it is based on Server 2008 R2 and needs a decent dual-core processor and 4GB+ RAM. It is also clumsy to use. This rig pulled 80W - not good enough.

I have purchased a DS211 at £220, which looks like the DS211J but has double the RAM. This has the same 80MB/s read speed as the DS211+ and am very impressed.

 

I have an Infrant ReadyNAS and the reason I bought it instead of doing a pc build with unRaid or other software setup is the size. I end up having to move a lot and not always for long periods of time so I know I can pick it up, drop it into a handbag sized pelican case and walk off. If I had this in a PC form factor, I would need a keyboard and monitor available wherever I was going or bring it with me.

 

I bought the DS411slim a few days ago with 4 disks (SAMSUNG Spinpoint M8 HN-M101MBB 1TB) in a RAID 5.

I ran ATTO Disk Benchmark against a simple samba share and got up to 57MB/s write and 90MB/s read (transfer size: 512KB, Total length: 2GB). That's with normal frames, I didn't managed to get the jumbo frames working even though the configuration seemed quite simple for PC and DS.

Not bad for 2.5" disks and even faster than my desktop's old sata 2 disk. At least for reading.

@Antony Leather: You said that you took noise and hard drive temperature into consideration. I miss those in your article. I would really like to hear about your DSM's CPU temp after load.

My DS ended up with 74°C CPU and ~40°C for the HDs (except the one next to the CPU with 45°C). I'm happy with the disks, but the CPU seems to be a bit hot.

Noise: The spin sound of the 2.5" disks is louder than the fan. So overall really quiet.

 

You wouldn't need all that, My home built NAS is an Atom based ITX machine in a tiny case from the itx-store, its not seen a keyboard and mouse or a monitor since I installed it over a year ago, very cheap to build has low power consumption and you can remote access it from the web browser.

It works just the same as it runs headless, just pick it up move it somewhere and switch it on, job done.

Its no faster than this NAS above though really but was cheaper even when including a few terabytes of disc.